Motivation crowding in online product reviewing: A qualitative study of amazon reviewers

Abstract

This research explores online reviewers’ motivations and how different motives interact with one another. Through in-depth interviews with Amazon reviewers and a six-month observation of the reviewers’ forums, the study found that extrinsic motivation may crowd out or crowd in intrinsic motivation in different scenarios. If a reviewer becomes driven mostly by status recognition and reciprocal obligation, their initial intrinsic enjoyment may suffer a crowding-out effect. The reviewer’s motivation mix can also be in a state of flux as they rise through the ranks. This research sheds new light on motivation crowding and offers implications for online review management.

Introduction

Online customer reviews play an increasingly important role in consumers’ purchase decisions. A typical online customer review consists of a numeric star rating summarizing the reviewer’s overall evaluation of a product and a short text of more detailed rendition of the consumption experience. According to recent marketing surveys, two-thirds of consumers trust customer opinions posted online [1] and 91% of shoppers read online reviews before making purchase [2]. Academic research has also documented the impact of online customer reviews on product sales: an increase in the average rating score or an addition of favorable review could have a positive impact on product sales [3,4].

However, what we know about reviewers is still very limited. As Hernández-Ortega [5] points out, to better understand the impact of online reviews, we should not only study what is being said in these reviews but also who says what. Reviewers generally are reluctant to disclose much of their personally identifiable information such as name and occupation. At the time of writing this manuscript, no reviewer ranked top 50 on Amazon.co.uk used their real name. The reviewers’ public profile pages are often left blank. Precisely because most reviewers choose to hide behind pseudonyms, Amazon provides a special “Real Name” badge to encourage posting review with real identity. On the contrary, like many other online spaces, a small percentage of most active reviewers on Amazon are contributing to the vast majority of the content [6]. The important role of these active reviewers and the scarcity of information about them beg the question: Who are these people and why are they writing so many product reviews?

On the surface, online reviewing is a type of prosocial behavior that is costly to reviewers and primarily benefits other consumers. To this end, it is similar to contributing programming codes in open source software (OSS) communities, where programmers voluntarily spend time to write software codes, which ultimately benefits the OSS community and beyond [7]. Prior research has identified a variety of motives behind these prosocial behaviors, including intrinsic motivation such as enjoyment and altruism, as well as extrinsic motivation such as reputation and career advancement [8,9]. While intrinsic and extrinsic motivation may each have distinctive effects on prosocial behavior, they may also interact with each other in different contexts [10,11]. Because online reviews have significant impact on consumers’ decision-making, some manufactures and sellers send free sample products to selected consumers, along with explicit request for positive review. This practice casts a shadow over the credibility of online customer reviews that are supposedly being generated by genuine customers.

As multiple motives may be behind the online reviewing phenomenon, the complexity of reviewers’ motivation in this seemingly prosocial act warrants further research. As von Krogh et al. [9] stated, despite a large body of literature on voluntary online knowledge contribution, little attention has been paid to the interaction between different types of motivation and how the interaction shapes contributor’s behavior. Even fewer studies in the Information Systems (IS) field use qualitative methods to investigate online reviewers’ motivation mix. The important research problem that Roberts et al. [12] raised – “how are the motivations of contributors related, i.e., are they independent, complementary, or contradictory?” – remains unanswered.

This is an important question for academics and practitioners alike. The interaction between types of motivation is still strongly debated among psychologists and economists, particularly about the generality and empirical relevance of “motivation crowding out” – an observation that providing extrinsic incentives can sometimes undermine intrinsic motivation for performing a certain act [11]. A study of online reviewers’ motivation mix and motivation interaction contributes novel empirical evidence to the debate. For IS researchers, this topic is of great relevance in many human–system interaction scenarios, where different motives are at play. For example, in a recent commentary about gamified information systems, Liu et al. [13] called for more research into how to achieve effective gamification designs by leveraging a variety of intrinsic and extrinsic rewards that are interacting with each other. Similarly, in Zhao et al.’s [14] study of social Q&A communities, the authors stated that little research has investigated how extrinsic motivation moderates the impact of intrinsic motivation on knowledge sharing in online communities. These recent papers all point to the opportunity for IS researchers to enrich the theory of motivation and to offer practical insights into how to leverage extrinsic rewards to encourage desirable actions in online spaces.

Through in-depth interviews with 27 reviewers on Amazon.co.uk and a six-month observation of Amazon reviewer forums, this research aims to explore the online reviewers’ motivation mix and how their different motives interact with one another. The present paper makes three principal contributions. First, as one of the first qualitative studies on online reviewers, this paper provides a rich and grounded description of why people contribute online reviews. Such a description is important to researchers and marketers, as it helps to understand motivational mechanisms of generating effective electronic word-of-mouth. Second, the study develops a preliminary framework depicting the interaction of extrinsic and intrinsic motivations in the context of online reviewing. The framework lays the ground for further theorization and empirical research on online reviewing or similar prosocial behaviors in online spaces. Third, the paper offers fresh insights, from review contributors’ perspective, into the design and management of online review systems. These insights will help system designers to improve the review platforms to curb “fake reviews” [15], while at the same time encourage genuine, high-quality contributions.

The remainder of this paper is structured as follows. In the next section, key literature on online reviewers’ motivations is discussed to set the background for the empirical work. The paper then describes the qualitative methodology and the details of data collection and analysis. Next, the paper presents findings about motivation types and their interactions, followed by a discussion of theoretical and practical implications. The paper concludes with a set of suggestions for future research.